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Share This Article:By Joe Nalven

Throughout history we find deceptions that have lulled us into thinking they were true. All that is required is a Pied Piper with a fanciful narrative and gullible listeners.

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Here are several deceptions over the past century.

The Soviet Potemkin Villages were constructed in the early 1930s to put a false face on the famine of Ukrainians. The New York Times reporter, Walter Duranty, won a Pulitzer Prize for buying into the Soviet deception. The New York Times offered an apology in 2003.

The Nazis misled the International Red Cross in beautifying the Terezin concentration camp (Theresienstadt Ghetto) in 1944. Once the Red Cross observers left this mirage, the Germans returned to deportations to Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka.

Rigoberta Mench, a Quiche Guatemalan, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for advocating for the rights of the indigenous. When her facts about the conflicts she described proved to be significantly inaccurate, the Nobel Prize committee, nevertheless, declined to void the prize. After all, she was a human rights activist waging the war for social justice. Those in her defense argued that the narrative of oppression was more important than the facts of oppression.

And perhaps the most pernicious of all, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This fabrication by Russian state police in the 1890s served as a catalyst for antisemitism. The London Times exposed The Protocols in 1921 as plagiarizing a French political satire, Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. The original 1864 satire never mentioned Jews, but the Russian deception persuaded the gullible for many decades, joining a series of long-lived anti-semitic tropes.

And now, the movie What Killed Michael Brown? explores a deception hypnotizing many who protest. This deception takes race relations in America in the wrong direction. That deception is hands up, dont shoot. The Washington Post gave it four Pinocchios in its fact-checking.

We know that it is a deception because President Obamas Attorney General Eric Holder investigated the shooting of Michael Brown and declined to bring any civil rights charges against Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot Michael Brown: Michael Browns death, though a tragedy, did not involve prosecutable conduct on the part of Officer Wilson.

Credible witnesses and forensic analysis led to the conclusion that Brown was not shot in the back; that Brown charged at the officer; that Browns DNA was on the officers collar. Holder concurred with his offices decision as representing the sound, considered and independent judgment of the expert career prosecutors.

The movie, What Killed Michael Brown, recounts the facts and the myths that surround Browns death in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. Shelby Steele, steeped in the history of social change for blacks in America, wrote and narrated the film. His son, Eli Steele, directed the movie.

Shelby Steele explains how those who advocate for social justice with hands up, dont shoot seek a poetic truth one that is not grounded in evidence, but a deception that demands us to conflate the present with past persecution. Those who wave the flag of poetic truth appear to be interested more in power rather than actually working on the communitys social issues.

Still, the fact is that many believe this deception. Poetic truth offers an attractive delusion. But instead of taking us into palpable change for blacks in America, it has, instead, deepened the divide on race relations and made it difficult to find a path to reforming current and past injustices.

Thats where Eli and Shelby Steeles powerful movie enters the discussion.

Anyone who pretends to want to repair race relations in America, anyone who pretends to repair the world, anyone who wants justice needs to see this movie.

Why this movie? The killing of a black man is not a new event. Shelby Steele himself filmed an earlier movie, Seven Days in Bensonhurst about the murder of Yusuf Hawkins. Yusuf was ambushed and killed in 1989 by white youths. They were tried and went to jail.

But is the killing of Michael Brown a repeat of Yusuf Hawkins? Or are we seeing something different? Do we rely on a persistent narrative of whites killing blacks or do we need to look at the facts of each event? Do we need to explore the history and context of Michael Brown to find out what else is responsible for killing him?

The Steeles present a multi-layered examination of blacks in America from the decade before the War on Poverty. The movie steers the viewer away from power and exploitation of Browns killing to the underlying factors driving the gullibility of those who feel required to believe the deception.

The movie takes us to East Saint Louis about 12 miles from Ferguson. Shelby Steele had worked there in a War on Poverty program. Wasnt this the justice work that needed to be done to repair poverty? But looking around, one area of the black community was demolished to make way for an imagined penthouse for the poor the Pruitt-Igoe projects. Built in the 1950s as a liberal promise to poverty, but then demolished in the 1970s as having failed that promise.

This imagined solution to poverty, arising from liberal aspirations, destroyed a community where blacks owned a majority of the housing. This was what outsiders saw a snapshot of poverty. They had good intentions.

Mayor Joseph Darst said in 1951, We must rebuild, open up and clean up the hearts of our cities. The fact that slums were created with all the intrinsic evils was everybodys fault. Now it is everybodys responsibility to repair the damage.

The reality was otherwise to the community that had been destroyed.

We return to Ferguson. The whites who lived there resisted white flight; they stayed and embraced social change away from racism. But they were caught off-guard by the explosion of violence that followed Michael Browns killing. So, too, were the Pakistani owners of the Ferguson Market where Michael Brown was caught on video and alerted the police. The owners offered to comply with the demands of protesters to help but were then asked to turn over their market. They were told they didnt belong.

They were Pakistanis they were immigrants. The movie tracks the craziness they emerged from Browns killing. Yes, the grief was notable, but the solutions were misguided.

The puzzle seems overwhelming. How does one move forward from this kaleidoscope of racial, immigrant, class, residents and outside agitators? The Steeles turn to individual transformation both by way of local clergy and individual responsibility. The individuals need to own their own future and not rely on liberals, especially guilt-ridden whites, to do the heavy lifting. The social entitlement programs such as Pruitt-Igoe projects, affirmative action and diversity programs give whites the illusion of moral legitimacy, a feeling of racial innocence, but fail to help the black underclass.

Why? Shelby Steele zeros in on that part of the solution often lacking among the media, elected officials and social commentators. Black individuals are robbed of agency, of being able to find solutions tailored to their situation, and instead forever dependent on whites to solve whatever problem for them. Shelby Steele sees liberals reliant on an ideology of white innocence (read: Im not a racist, let me help), and requiring blacks to be blacks and not just human beings.

From Steeles perspective, racism is not Americas original sin; it is used as a means to power. The original civil rights movement was one of good-faith, of wanting to become part of America; some of the current protests are a bad faith movement, wanting to destroy America, wanting to destroy the nuclear family, wanting to destroy capitalism.

The move is available on https://whatkilledmichaelbrown.com/. Go see it. Test yourself with the Steeles adventure into American history, the deceptions and the facts, and a possible path forward.

But I wonder how many of us are among the gullible. I wondered if Eli Steele had a different audience in mind than the readers of this movie review. I asked Eli, and I was surprised, though I shouldnt have been: Great question. We made this movie with black teens in mind. They need to know their history in its full complexity. That allows for a solid foundation to move forward.

Joe Nalven is a former associate director of theInstitute for Regional Studies of the Californiasat San Diego State University.

Opinion: What Killed Michael Brown? A Controversial Movie About Truth and Lies was last modified: October 24th, 2020 by Editor

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Opinion: What Killed Michael Brown? A Controversial Movie About Truth and Lies - Times of San Diego